Posted
by
kdawson
on Friday March 19, 2010 @02:37PM
from the eyes-of-the-world-are-upon-you dept.

mikrorechner writes "The H Online has a writeup of the problems encountered by LiMux (Wikipedia entry), one of the most prominent Linux migration projects in the world, trying to introduce free software into the highly heterogenous IT infrastructure of the City of Munich. Quoting: 'Florian Schiessl, deputy head of Munich's LiMux project for migrating the city's public administration to Linux, has, for the first time, explained why migrating the city's computing landscape to open source software has taken longer than originally planned.'" Here is Shiessl's blog, in which he details some of the transition problems.

Aw man, what do I tell my family? Especially my wife? I've been using macs pretty consistently for the last three years...am I slowly turning gay right now as we "speak"? Or is it more of a "you'll first slowly stop allowing your wife to pick out your clothes for you" followed by trimming your eye brows? What's next? A man purse? Oops, sorry, I meant a "European Shoulder bag".

Everyone always underestimates how long anything non-trivial is going to take. In this case it seems like not only were they trying to migrate to a new platform, but also trying to undo every past mistake, oversight and quickly implemented solutions that appeared on the surface to work just fine. That's going to take just a little while to get done.

Every major project always takes longer than expected because so many small details are exposed as you uproot any existing system or workflow process. Instead of looking at this as something that may have been "more trouble than they bargained for" we should learn from it and understand that migrating to Linux won't be any easier than migrating to or from any other platform. I think there are two things to take away from Munich's Linux migration:
* It can be done.
* Being on the leading edge carries with it a lot of responsibility to those who will follow you.

but it sounds like most of the problems were due to underestimating how many non-standard development tools and products were used and the trouble getting those over to GNU/Linux. Many of them required either the original vendor to port to an open standard or replacing the existing product with one which was based on open standards. The first option meant that most likely a Microsoft Partner Program member would have to be hired to provide the same product for the GNU/Linux clients. This might normally be an easier option except being a _Microsoft Partner_ often times means you are not allowed to work on other platforms. So the 2nd option is most likely their only choice and that is more expensive in that it would require all users to change the underlying software they currently use for the task.

All in all, this sounds like confirmation that Microsoft's strategy of proprietary API's and patented IP was successful in making it costly to leave their platform. It also shows that it is not impossible and in the long run, it will probably be shown that getting off the Microsoft treadmill might be expensive up front but over time, become very cost effective. Rip and Replace most often ends up resulting in a better, faster, cheaper solution when managed well.

It's not ambiguous in the spec, it's undefined in the spec. But one thing is defined in the spec: a way to do application-specific spreadsheet formulas without breaking the standard and without conflicting with a standardized way of expressing formulas when it's finally standardized. The expectation is that applications will do formulas their own way, possibly recognizing other application-specific formulas (there actually aren't that many different formats). When formulas are finally standardized applications will begin using the standard and will convert any non-standard formulas they recognize into the standard form when the spreadsheet's read in, resulting in a quiet upgrade to the standard form.

And in the meantime, ODF can be used for things like word-processing documents that don't require formulas without having to wait for one spreadsheet-specific feature to be completed.

I recommend to read the blog as it's more informative and it's also rather optimistic. Not just woes as the title would lead you to believe. Of course making the switch to free software takes work, but it's a great opportunity for constant improvement and as Mr. Shiessl points out, there is much digital waste to be cleaned up on exit from the proprietary.

Can't speak to that, but having read the article, it bears little resemblance to the posting title. From what I can tell, this sounds like some mistakes in planning the migration early on. That would happen if you were moving to any new system, FOSS or proprietary.

Very true, by the sound of the blog most of their problems stem from how poorly the systems were managed before. Different versions of Windows running different levels of updates; hundreds of authorized apps, many with overlapping or duplicate functionality; unauthorized applications that had made their way into the work-flows without being documented; proprietary software that didn't follow open standards. I wonder how much of their effort has gone into just getting their infrastructure should have been before the transition even started.

there is much digital waste to be cleaned up on exit from the proprietary.

This is not a proprietary/FOSS issue. Every programmer knows that version 2 of the code is better than version 1. More than once I've "rm *.o" and gotten rid of more than just the objects on the way to recompiling them all, and every time that happens, the code I write to replace what went away is tighter, cleaner, and runs faster. I already know what works, I already know the processes, and I usually come up with a better solution

I guess what you mean is once you want to adopt new standardized protocols that differ from the ones commonly in use, upgrading will be hard. Let's not pretend that these standards have been around for decades, they represent a change.

sounds like they spent a lot of money. what is the difference in spending the money on OSS compared to MS software? the software might be free, but it sounds like you will spend the same amount of money on making everything work like it did before with the same functionality

With in house you have the pleasure of spending money on developers. Either you pay Microsoft developers or you pay your own developers. Don't like MS developers? You can pay IBM devs, Oracle devs, India devs, Vietnamese devs, American... (who am I kidding).

You CANNOT escape the fact that software requires maintenance. It comes down to cost. Is it more cost effective to do it yourself, or to pay someone else? There are benefits to each solution. You don't get a free lunch. How is an in house solutio

They aren't trying to make "everything work like it did before with the same functionality". They could have

We could have switched to linux clients in just a few months, giving the order to all 21 IT units to set up a linux client until end of 2008. No further specifications, no standardization and no consolidation. I’m pretty sure they would have done this excellent and then I would have published great news in 2007 or 2008 “LiMux done, Munich completely on free software”.

but the aim is/was to move from a very heterogeneous network (in terms of used OS and software solutions) to some overall standard, which is why it takes so long.

It's not really possible to asses that. The article really doesn't have much to say about Linux, so much as it was about all the crufty patchwork of multiple systems they were using before. There's a big cost associated with continuing to use the current kludges, though it is difficult to assign hard numbers to, since they come in the form of lost opportunities and inefficiency spread throughout the whole organization.

Moving to any modern, unified system, whether based around Microsoft software or OSS, is

I can think of some befits.1. The money be spent on in house staff and or local consultants instead of on Microsoft Software. That money will say in country and flow through the economy and not be exported out of country.2. Long term savings. Once the migration is done there will be no need to purchase new versions of Office, Windows, and other proprietary software.3. Enhanced expandability. To add a news server or clients do not require purchasing more CALs. also if you have spent the money on in house tal

If I remember correctly, switching to open source was more expensive than keeping the propietary software. But they still went for open source and open standards, because long term it would be more cheap - no licenses, possibility of choosing different software that implements the same protocol, posibility of choosing better software vendors, not just one...etc etc.

They hope to save in the future. As a lot of the costs are consolidating their terrible IT landscape it is not clear, what a migration to the latest MS offering would have costs, either. It is not as if it would have been free either, who knows how many of the macros would have broken down when run in a current version of Excel, who knows how many old programs might stop working on Vista (and be it due to a stupid installer). It would have been cheaper, at least probably because a lot would have still worked, but when they write that they found 21 different Windows setups with differing patch levels and security settings, I am not so sure if it really would have been cheaper.

What they probably hope is, that the next migration will be cheaper, the OSS they use won't cost them to upgrade, the costs of the upgrade in work to be done by their IT department are probably not very different when upgrading a Linux solution from a MS solution. But all the work to get their systems closer to a common base might actually make the next big roll out simpler and therefor cheaper.

Well, migrating an entire organization to the newest version of Windows (with the accompanying upgrades to all the other MS software) isn't exactly cheap. That's why so many corporations are still running XP: they can't justify the costs of upgrading to Vista or Windows 7.

I note that a lot of the problems they ran into weren't problems with the Linux-based software, they were problems with the proprietary (Windows and Windows-based) software not wanting to play nice with anybody else. One advantage of movin

Previously, around 1,000 staff had been maintaining the 15,000 PCs making up the Munich computing landscape in 21 independent IT centres. There was, according to Schießl, no common directory, no common user management, no common hardware or software management. There were more than 300 applications in use, many of which did the same job. On the desktop side, there were 21 different Windows systems with different update levels and security settings

You can't convert a bureaucracy like this anymore than you can build a political/military empire by invading a dozen good size countries and trying to integrate them all at once. Rome wasn't built in a day. They should have gone in first with the intention of standardizing things, straightening out all of the kinks and quirks each little fief had. All of the file servers here where possible, all OpenOffice there...

By the sounds of things, that's kind of what they ended up doing. Thing is, when you have a hodgepodge like this, you have to standardize on something, and that's going to affect and change whatever is around that isn't already adhering to that standard (i.e. most everything). The problem that they had, near as I can tell, is they decided on the solution before they determined what the problem was - they decided they'd standardize on their LiMux client, then started filling in the blanks. Granted, with a

Well, they tried a horizontal migration strategy, moving from location to location and department to department. That meant the problems never stopped.

A better approach might have been to do a vertical top-down migration: Servers: first roll out a directory server infrastructure, then a CIFS strategy etc.; Clients: migrate away from MSIE / Active X, then to CUPS, then away from MS Office etc.. And then, finally, to change the desktop OS out from underneath.

A suggested strategy for those planning something similar: 1: migrate the server services (and create a shiny new unified and consistent infrastructure); 2: migrate the desktop apps to FOSS alternatives (chose apps which will work under your target desktop OS); 3: switch out the desktop OS for linux (the users retain the apps they have become used to).

A better approach might have been to do a vertical top-down migration: Servers: first roll out a directory server infrastructure, then a CIFS strategy etc.; Clients: migrate away from MSIE / Active X, then to CUPS, then away from MS Office etc.. And then, finally, to change the desktop OS out from underneath.

They seem to have taken a more blended approach. A separate project was revamping many of the servers at the same time. They did immediately move away from MS Office to OpenOffice and ODF because they could do so without having to worry about the servers and they laud it as one of the biggest benefits so far. I don't know of any good reason why they should have held off on that. The problem with a top down migration is that many times you don't know what all the services inside your organization and out are actually used. So rolling out a series of Linux clients in every department allows you to discover what your platform specific dependencies are. In some cases they changed the Linux client to work with those services and in some they changed the services to work with Linux.

A suggested strategy for those planning something similar: 1: migrate the server services (and create a shiny new unified and consistent infrastructure);

The problem here is in your first step you may have broken a bunch of things and users will have to start changing the way they work. From their perspective you've downgraded the system. That's because they're using a client that does not work as well with your new servers as your Linux clients will. So you've just given the majority of your users a bad taste for the whole thing and generated tons of pushback that can kill your whole migration.

I think it would make more sense to switch to as many platform agnostic applications as possible, first. Then implement the servers and desktops simultaneously in one part of the company, while letting the users have access to their old desktop via a remote session. Fix the compatibility problems and move on to the next chunk of the company until you can start repurposing the old servers and getting rid of the remote desktop sessions altogether.

Regional government of the autonomous community of Valencia (Spain) also switched [lwn.net] to free software, last year they released a detailed report [gvpontis.gva.es] (english) of the problems they found and how they fixed it. It took a lot of time to complete it (4 years) and they still depend on propietary software for some systems. These migrations need a lot of work...

Why is the Linux migration project in Munich so prominent, as mentioned in TFS? I know of much larger migrations, both in terms of the number of computers and the geographic area covered. The Brazilian government has been migrating to Free Software in mass. The Bank of Brazil, for example, has over 100,000 computers running Firefox and BrOffice. As of last June, the estimate was right at 100,000, with 65,000 of those machines running Linux and 35,000 running other operating systems. The Bank of Brazil has branches and offices all over Brazil, which is a very large country. The mass migration happened in 2006, before the migration really began in Munich. The number of machines involved (counting the Linux boxes only) is about 5 times as large as the number of machines to be involved in Munich, and instead of being located in a single city, they are spread out all over a country that's larger than the US would be if it didn't have Alaska, but smaller than the US with Alaska (i.e., larger in area than the "lower 48" plus DC plus Hawaii). In the year 2006 alone, the Bank of Brazil estimated that it saved R$20MM by using Free Software.

FWIW, I've also seen Linux desktops at the ITI (Brazil's IT Institute). Even totally non-nerdy ITI employees seemed perfectly at home on Linux desktops when I was there as long ago as early-to-mid 2005. The Bank of Brazil branch where my company has its account has all Linux desktops. The managers who take care of my account think it's funny when I crane my neck to look at their monitors and geek out on the software their 'puters are running. They are total non-nerds and not only appear to be happy with the Linux desktops, but told me they are. It took them a minute to figure out what I was asking - they didn't think of using Linux desktops as anything all that unusual.

Why is the Linux migration project in Munich so prominent, as mentioned in TFS?

Because the guy who wrote it is German and lives in Munich.

There's nothing stopping you from writing up a submission about Banco do Brasil yourself. You seem to have access to a source with a whole bunch of good information, I'm sure a success story like the one you described would get coverage on slashdot too if someone made the effort to submit it.

Because ripping out an infrastructure that relies on closed-source proprietary software and replacing it with free, Free software is hard. Really, really hard.

Yes, it's easy to rip out that clunky old Exchange server that has never really worked right, and slap in something running Exim and Courier-IMAP. The tricky bit is all the little edge cases and micro-applications - things that are *really important* that rely on someone running an Excel macro on the right machine at the right time. No, I'm not say

How does this compare to the problems experienced by people migrating 15,000 clients running various Windows releases to Windows 7? Is migrating to Linux more or less costly than migrating to the latest release out of Redmond?

How come in these discussions noone ever mentions the software they're using (eg. GOsa, see https://www.gosa-project.org/ [gosa-project.org] ) ? GOsa is a web admin front-end which allows management of clients and servers through an LDAP based infrastructre and RPC backend. Services that can be managed include Samba+PDC, email+groupware, FAI & OPSI (for auto-install of Linux and Windows clients), DNS, DHCP, Squid, Asterisk, Linux terminal server clients, and quite a bit more. It IS very hard to get working though.

Hmmm... I just noticed that Munich is no longer listed as a reference on the GOsa site - I wonder if there is a story there.

Now seriously, I've read that all this migration has cost MILLIONS from public fonds and there are rumors that some heads are going to to roll soon because of this. In the university I am working for some IT-boss though it was a great idea to replace a well working First Class conferencing system that had been working GREAT for years by the Open Source Sakai. Well, the results: several millions have been wasted in this, there are (maaany) problems with the new platform, teachers hate it, students hate it...

Aaaah, I see now. If once piece of software is rubbish, then surely any other pieces of software under the same license must also be rubbish!

With this in mind I think it is safe to say that we can write off proprietary software from seriously competeing in the real world, you would not believe how many stories about proprietary software messing up I can find...

What is that? That's not actually what you were claiming, you were just being offtopic? Oh, I see...

When considering open source software, you should never, ever consider the costs of replacing an existing closed source system that works in every possible way with an inferior open source offering. You should consider instead all of the very fine software projects that are produced by the open source community. You should also remember that closed source systems are, by definition, thought and deed, inferior to any open source software, even when it isn't, don't be lazy, you stoopid noob, you have the source.

I apologize for this post about replacing closed source software with open source software in a discussion about the city of Munich replacing their closed source software with open source software. It is obviously off topic.

You know, I have yet to find a closed-source OS that can run everything I want. In fact, there's no single OS that will run everything I want. For my personal preferences, Linux (along with Wine and similar programs) does a good job. For yours, I don't know.

A long time ago, I decided to start making copies of my floppies onto hard drives, so I'd have images of them before the deteriorated. I made that decision because I had a never opened boxed version of Novell UnixWare (from around 1994). It had sat in a professional air conditioned office until sometime around 2000. It was given to me, and it sat in my computer room for a long time. I finally decided to unbox it and give it a try. It came on floppy disks (3 of them, if I remember right). I went out and bought a floppy drive for this adventure, since all mine had either gathered such an accumulation of dust that I couldn't find the opening, or I had simply thrown them away.

I put the first disk in, and half way through reading it, there were errors. The disk, although in the original unopened envelope, in the original unopened shrinkwrapped box, had deteriorated. {sigh}

I tried several other disks that I had been carrying around with me for years, "just in case" I needed them for something. As it turned out, about 2/3 of them were unreadable, just from age.

So, I tossed them all, and gave the drive away to someone else who wanted to use it. He had a better success rate, something like 75% were readable.

I was talking to some kids not too long ago, about disks. I kept asking them, to see if they even had a clue what a floppy disk is. One correctly described a 3.5" floppy, but none had seen a 5.25" floppy.:) It's probably all for the better, they really sucked.

...and then pay in house developers to reproduce all of the functionality that your proprietary system was providing. As the OP said, there is no such thing as a free lunch.

Did you read the article? It mentioned a lot of VBA macros that had to be converted into a similar system that managed templates, automation, etc. In other words, the functionality had to be re-created.

Shouldn't that have been evaluated before starting the project in the first place? If you rely on a lot of legacy proprietary functionality, you should probably determine costs beforehand of either a) replicating that functionality in the new system or b) justifying whether you need the functionality in the first place.

That sounds like you have a bunch of xbox 360 games but don't want the console...then buying a Mac and wondering why the games won't work on it...

It is actually extremely rare for anyone to do a proper evaluation...I know people who will evaluate multiple options based on their marketing literature and create a spreadsheet comparing feature checkboxes...Some people won't even pay lip service to doing an evaluation, and will just choose something quite arbitrarily.In the munich case, he chose open source and open standards for the significant long term benefits they will provide...

Give it a few years and noone will be able to argue against it, and the

VBA was probably their only choice. In 2000, where was OpenOffice? Where was the Linux desktop? VBA has been around for a "long time" when measured in IT years. At the time they probably went with the "free" tool built into the application that happened to be compatible with the majority of their other applications.

People bag on VBA like it is worthless. If was totally worthless it wouldn't have been used as often as it was. If there were good alternatives it wouldn't have the market penetration that

VBA was used because there were no other options when you're already locked into an MS stack...Corel always made a much better suite than MS, and yet they were pushed out of the market by an inferior product... It's not about how good something is, its about how heavily marketed or pushed via other means it is.

I worked at one of the major Australian banks; Excel/VBA was the norm, not the exception. It was uniformly horrid (except for the stuff I wrote, of course;P). It was also highly portable, and standard enough to send betweeen different financial organisations (we're talking "financial instruments worth billions").

The real reason for all that VBA code, and one that nearly caused me to post this AC, was a bit more back-door.

A department can hire people to write a few Excel macros locally, but anything tha

Sounds like they failed at evaluation. They picked these shackles when they used VBA, sounds like piss poor planning.

No IT department ever planned to based business processes off spreadsheet macros, its more like "Hey did you know this guy in accounting wrote a big nasty spreadsheet with 25,000 lines of VBA code?"

One of the the things mentioned in the article was that their IT support structure was decentralized and non-standardized, which would make for a difficult project even if they were doing a Microsoft-to-Microsoft migration. You could argue they bit off more than anyone could chew, which is why this is taking so l

Why do you say that? If you interpreted khasim's statement as implying that Germany can and should hire German programmers out of some kind of nationalism (which isn't how I interpreted it), then that's offensive no matter which government we're talking about. Still, I hardly ever hear people (besides myself) saying that things like "Buy American-Made" is offensive anyway.

It seems more like practicality to me. If you are a government and have to spend similar amounts of money might as well spend it where you get some back as taxes. Exporting your wealth is generally a bad idea.

Surely the world would be much better off without nationalism. Just as the world is better off without Townism, Caveism, and Familyism. We are bigger than our countries make us look. Being proud of other people's achievements makes as much sense as being full after someone else eats dinner. You didn't do it, so why be proud of it? Simply because the person doing something cool was accidentally born in the same place you were accidentally born? How does that make sense? It's just people trying to find

I'm surprised that there aren't any Microsoft fans with mod points today, or he would have been (incorrectly) modded troll anyway. Hell, yesterday in the thread about which AV software was best, I was modded troll for mentioning that Windows was the only OS that needed AV.

Antivirus software exists for both Linux and OS X, by the way. Your argument is trolly, as it's not even true. But anyway, you had your ass handed to you by the moderators already for that one, so fair enough.

They'd be paying German programmers if that was important to them. Otherwise they'd outsource it to India like every other large organization. The article mentions that the IT department was somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 employees. Employees are trainable. It doesn't matter if they are running Linux, Windows, Unix or OSX. Their systems required trained administrators.

To all the OSS zealots, where is the cost savings on labor? Where is the meme that it takes more labor resources to manage Window

So rather than benefiting everyone, they benefit the local economy. That seems sort of selfish, in a nationlistic, protectionist sort of way. (I'm just teasing, I tend to promote local solutions whenever possible). The real meat of my question is what the savings really are. They are spending a certain amount of money on "licensing fees". They are going to stop spending money on licensing fees and start spending it on "in house development". What I'm curious about is the real difference between the two

The benefit is if they develop an open source permit system, then many people can use it for free.Many people will contribute to the open source permit system.

If it's based on open standards, then other folks will be able to develop compatible permit systems in the future.

They won't have to buy a copy for version 1992, then version 1995, then version 1998, then version 1998se, then version 2000, then version 2003, then version 2005, then version 2006, and finally for version 2010.

With closed data and closed source- you pay and pay and pay. (and will continue to pay in the future).

And it they go belly up or stop supporting the product, then you are really screwed.

---

All of my personal software stack except dragon dictate is now opensource products that use open source data formats (and support most proprietary formats as well).

When the 2007 versions of office came out- they were damn hard to climb the learning curve (about 5-7 months to get back full productivity and some of my 2003 documents became unprintable-- which I solved by moving them to openoffice).

Munich had a real hairball. At the end of the move, their systems will be much cleaner. And they won't have to rebuy the same software 10 more times over the next 30 years (if the current track record holds).

They are going to stop spending money on licensing fees and start spending it on "in house development". What I'm curious about is the real difference between the two.

A licensing fee, especially one that is sent abroad, is not contributing to the education or employment of citizens of the country. If you hire local developers, they will become good at programming and will be able to design more software later. This is exactly the question of giving a man a fish or a fishing rod.

If you take this situation to the extreme, as an illustration, you can have a country that spends $100M yearly on licensing and still has not a single programmer who can write "Hello, World". This means that those $100M will have to be spent year after year.

Buying proprietary software doesn't benefit everyone, it only benefits the single vendor of that software (to your own detriment often, as you get locked in)...Buying locally shifts that benefit away from a single foreign entity, to one or more local entities which is beneficial for government who get their tax revenue from those same local entities.

However, by using open source they are contributing benefits to everyone... Any development they contribute back will benefit everyone, even any bug reports they make will ultimately benefit the community as a whole.

The development costs will be a one off...Having maintained windows, linux, solaris and novell based networks my experience is basically...

You require competent staff to manage any system properly, microsoft marketing says otherwise so windows networks often end up being operated very badly by incompetent staff (and have major security and stability problems as a result)... Generally only more competent people even know linux exists, so the cheaper less competent staff will never even think to try linux - i

No free lunch? Poor guy never had a grandma. Some other incorrect old sayings:

"You get what you pay for". If someone says that, hold on to your wallet, because you're likely to pay for far more than what you get. You usually pay for what you get, but you don't always get what you pay for. Ask any con artist.

"Money doesn't grow on trees, you know." Tell that to someone who owns an orchard.

"Nothing worthwile is free." Air?

"You pays your money and you takes your chances." OK, that one is usually correct.

Reading the fine article, it seems the big problem was not propriety versus not proprietary, or Microsoft versus non-Microsoft. It was that they were trying to fix a very heterogenous and confusing mess with a homogenous consistent infrastructure. All stuff that should be upgraded and fixed, but doing that takes time and effort and often isn't worth the hassle. Ie, a proprietary system with non-open standards can't be ripped out and quickly replaced with something else, no matter how bad the proprietary

The real problem then was that they didn't made an in-depth analysis of what they were using originally. It's always the same.

That is not how I understand the blog. They started the transition, and realised that yes, they could do a transition in the allocated time frame, but they wouldn't get the maximum benefit that way. So the plan changed. Instead of saying "we planned to do it in X months, so we do it in X months", they said "we could do it in X months, but we could get much better long term results if we do a better job that takes 2X months".